


I Could Never Define All That You Are To Me

by LittlePageAndBird



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Darillium (Doctor Who), F/M, Heist, Idiots in Love, Love, Married Couple, Nightmares, Old Married Couple, Romance, Snapshots, So Married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:27:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23756137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittlePageAndBird/pseuds/LittlePageAndBird
Summary: Five times on Darillium that the Doctor told River he loved her without saying it.
Relationships: The Doctor/River Song, Twelfth Doctor/River Song
Comments: 14
Kudos: 102





	I Could Never Define All That You Are To Me

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Hozier's Movement. Enjoy! xx

“Off for some more digging today?” the Doctor asks as they’re making breakfast, remarkably without pulling a face - though admittedly, she can’t always tell when this face is pulling a face.

River hums. They haven’t been here very long - longer than she ever thought he’d be able to stay in one place without scaling the walls out of boredom, but not long at all in the grand scheme of twenty-four years - and she’s already acquired quite the handsome fossil collection. Darillium is dreamy from an archaeological perspective, as well as many others. “Thought I’d have another nosey around the foot of the Towers,” she tells her husband, who’s spooning sugars into his coffee. She drops a kiss between his shoulder blades as she passes him on the way to the fridge. “See what else I can find.”

The Doctor lifts his head, eyes following her. “Thought maybe I could come along.”

She stops so abruptly that milk sloshes onto the bench. “On a dig?”

“Yeah.”

“On a _dig_.”

He shrugs, taking a swig of his coffee. “Why not?”

“Your lifelong disdain for archaeology springs to mind.” 

He smiles at her over the rim of his mug. “I happen to know a very convincing archaeologist.”

After checking him over for a raised temperature or signs of poisoning, she swings by the living room to pick him up once she’s dressed for the occasion, hands propped on hips to show off her khaki overalls and muddied boots. “What do you think?”

He smiles in that way that makes his nose scrunch up. “Amazing.”

He’s said it so much to her these past few weeks that it’s become somewhat of a running joke between them, but it still surprises her a little. She bundles her tools into her bag, trying to hide her smile. “Yes, well. You called those slugs at the Dakkan swamps amazing.”

“Oh, come on - iridescent slugs?! That’s just objectively sexy!”

Her own nose scrunches fondly. “You’re weird.”

They spend most of their walk to the dig site at the foot of the Towers debating the most impressive sub-species of slug. River sets down her rucksack near the mark in the ground she’d left for herself when she was last here, while the Doctor whistles at the holes peppering the ground. “You’ve been busy.”

She takes a moment to survey her work as she ties her hair back. “Suppose I have. The ground here is gorgeous for digging. And there are some very nice rocks.”

“Oh, I do love a nice rock.”

His voice sounds far away, and is followed by the sound of metal repeatedly hitting something solid. She turns to find him taking chunks out of the soil with one of her trowels, and watches him in faint horror. “What are you doing?”

He looks up, innocent. “I’m helping.”

“You’re hindering. You can’t just go hacking at the ground, you have to - look. Let me show you.” She drops to her knees next to him, prying the trowel out of his hand. He listens attentively as she guides him through the basic skills that she usually teaches her undergraduate students, until she feels safe to tentatively return the confiscated trowel.

They work in companionable silence under the moonlight - this face seems less desperate to fill silences, she observes as she steals glances at him while she digs. He calls out to her when he finds his first treasure.

“River! Come and look at this shell fossil!”

As she turns at his excited yelp, her hand slips from the edge of the hole she’s digging. Her palm smacks against the hard rock at the bottom, forcing her hand back and sending a hot jolt of pain shooting up to her elbow. She regains her balance in a second, but her wrist is throbbing. “Ah! Damn it!”

He’s at her side in an instant, picking up her hand. “Let me see.”

He presses his fingertips carefully across it, brow furrowed in concentration. “Just a sprain.”

She sighs. “Bugger. That’s my best digging hand.”

His hand stills, cradling her wrist. Their eyes meet above it, and she knows that look on his face all too well. “If you’re thinking of doing what I think you’re thinking of doing, I will bury you alive in this hole.”

His jaw flexes, though his eyes are soft. “River.”

He says her name like a plea, and she shakes her head. “Don’t you dare. I mean it.” He sighs through his nose, his thumb twitching against her skin like he’s itching to disobey her. “I’m not having you waste it like that.”

“It’s not a waste when it’s you,” he mutters, holding her gaze in a way that stops her breathing, even as he gives up and lets go of her wrist. “Do you have a first-aid kit with you?”

“In my rucksack,” she answers after a moment.

He fetches it without a word, and bats her good hand away when she insists she can do it. Once he’s tied the bandage off in a neat bow, he opens her hand and drops the small shell fossil he’s found into her palm. “Do you know what species this is from? I don’t recognise it.”

“Neither do I,” she admits, surprising herself, and looks up at him. “Did you just… out-archaeology me?”

He grins. “And on my first go! You’ll have to up your game, Professor.”

* * *

She sits at the kitchen island in the dark, trying to steady her breathing.

This hasn’t happened for a while - in fact, she’s been sleeping like a baby ever since they started living here. Their sleeping patterns are synchronised - she thinks he needs it less frequently than she does, but he always comes to lie with her anyway. Having him next to her - hearing his steady breathing, feeling his skin against hers - seems to help. That, and the Towers humming an ever-present lullaby. 

Tonight, though, she’d woken with her hearts flying forwards from clouded scenes of an abandoned orphanage and the sound of her mother screaming. Maybe it was the documentary they’d watched the other day about early Earth space travel. Or the Doctor keeping score at Scrabble with tallies on the back of his hand. Maybe it was the new waiter with the eyepatch.

A hand on her shoulder startles her and she jumps, wheeling around with a raised fist.

The Doctor holds up his hands but doesn’t flinch, voice soothing. In his crumpled dressing gown, hair sticking up on one side and eyes heavy with sleep, he looks about as unthreatening as he possibly can. “Easy, easy.”

“Bloody hell! Are you looking to get shot? Don’t do that!” She leans on the counter, resting her head in her hands with a groan.

“Sorry.” He dips around her to switch the kettle on, grabbing two mugs from the shelf and dropping tea bags into them, all the while watching her carefully. “Bad dream?”

His voice is gentle, but it still makes her recoil. He doesn’t press her any further, and she listens to the whistle of the kettle as she fumes. Two hundred and one bloody years old. She’s a warrior, a queen - a fucking _legend_. In some corners of the universe, they daren’t even speak her name. In others she’s a whole religion. _Nightmares_. Like a sodding child. How humiliating.

“I have them too, sometimes,” the Doctor says as he stirs the tea, his voice pulling her back from the place where she wants to break things. “Stuff from when I was a kid, more often than not. Don’t even realise I remember it until it’s there. Sometimes bad things stick. I think humans have an acronym for it - they have an acronym for everything.” He comes to stand in front of her at the counter, pushing her mug across the bench. “Trauma is nothing to be ashamed of. The presence of fear doesn’t make any of us less brave.”

“Don’t be nice to me,” she snaps, because it’s either that or she bursts into tears and she’ll be damned if she’s going to embarrass herself any further. She feels a little pull in her chest when the Doctor turns away, but he returns a few seconds later with several packets of biscuits balanced in his arms.

She watches as he empties them one by one onto a plate, until they resemble a small hill. “Don’t worry, this isn’t me being nice. I fancied some anyway.” He swipes three biscuits off the plate at once, pressing them together in a makeshift sandwich and taking a huge bite.

She laughs, and his whole face lights up.

* * *

A new print on the wall of the restaurant had caught her eye - this small, unremarkable little watercolour of two blurred figures walking hand-in-hand down a village street. The original painting, it turned out, was hanging in one of the most prestigious galleries this side of the galaxy. So, of course, she’d managed to coax her ever-grumbling husband into an after-dinner heist.

She hadn’t quite managed to get her hands on the damn thing when the security guard had caught up to them. The guard’s metal hand had just closed around River’s neck when the Doctor, for reasons unknown to her, thought it seemed like a good idea to knock him - an eight-foot-tall cyborg with an attitude problem - to the floor. 

Which brings her to where she is now - sitting on their bathroom floor, carefully inserting tampons into her husband’s bloody nostrils. “There you go. That should do it.” She sits back and tries not to laugh. “Not your most dignified hour, my darling.”

He dabs at his nose gingerly, wincing. “I think it’s broken.”

“It’s not broken, you old drama queen. You’ll be fine. If you stop _touching it_.”

His fingers fall away from his nose abruptly at her warning, and he looks sheepish. She sighs impatiently, licking her thumb to rub a spot of dried blood from his cheek. “I still don’t know what the hell you thought you were doing.”

“I was protecting you!”

“What have I told you about doing that? And you’re _rubbish_ at violence.”

“Hey! I know Venusian Aikido!”

She raises an eyebrow. “Oh? And did that help?”

“Not on this occasion,” he concedes sulkily.

She ruffles his hair. “Doesn’t tend to have much of an effect on cyborgs. Throwing them through a thirtieth floor window tends to prove far more effective.”

“Thanks for coming to the rescue on that front,” he says, somewhat reluctantly. 

“No problem, Damsel.”

He pouts at her smug smile, but seems to realise he can hardly argue given the circumstances. “Got your phone on you?” he asks suddenly.

“Yes, why?”

“You should look up the painting. See what happened to it in the end.” 

She pulls her phone out, sighing as she scans her eyes over a website entry on the painting. “The last place the art was seen was on the wall of the Saturnine Gallery,” she reads aloud. “Well, we’ve tried that.”

And they’re certainly not trying it again any time soon, she thinks, glancing at her husband’s swollen nose. She’d almost feel guilty, if she had the conscience for it. Much as she loved collecting, particularly things that ought not to belong to her, no painting could catch her eye enough to justify him doing this to his pretty face. No matter how much the two abstract figures in it reminded her of her parents. 

“Hang on.” She follows a link entitled _Disappearance_ , and frowns as she reads the next section. “A mysterious figure, who eyewitnesses would describe as… dashing... was seen swiping the painting from the wall with a…” She narrows her eyes. “A dexterity which some, particularly... _big-haired archaeologists_ , might find rather beguiling - did you write this?”

“Maybe. Oh look! What’s this in the mysterious figure’s incredibly fashionable jacket?”

He reaches into his pocket and she gasps, holding out her hands so he can place the painting in them. It’s so much more beautiful now it’s hers. “When did you - how?”

He smiles, as best he can with a nose like Santa’s leading reindeer. “Your Damsel’s not just a pretty face.”

* * *

“River. River. _River_.”

She opens one eye to glare at him. He’s hovering above her, for some unfathomable reason fully dressed, with that stupid impish grin on his face.

“Darling, how many times?” she mumbles groggily, trying to bat him away with her pillow. “If you wake me up for reasons that do _not_ involve your head between my thighs, I’ll have no choice but to strangle you.”

He leans in closer until his nose touches hers. “The Andromedis meteor storm is overhead.”

She scrambles up on her elbows. “The - really?”

He nods excitedly, holding out his hand. “Come on!”

She lets him lead her, pulling one of his jumpers on over her pyjamas. They climb up the drop-down ladder in the study that takes them up through the skylight window and onto the roof.

Meteors burn like sparks in the sky above them, brilliant white flashes that make her hearts beat a little faster. This storm is one of the most famous in the galaxy. “Oh, wow,” she breathes. His warm hand slips into hers, and she squeezes it. “When I was little. In Leadworth. I used to sneak out in the middle of the night and climb onto the roof of the community centre to look at the stars.”

“I did the same thing! Only mine was a barn.”

He catches her looking up at him - she loves him most when he’s looking to the stars - and gives her that silly grin of his. Sometimes she gets so caught up in their tangled timelines that she forgets how very similar they are. Bespoke. She tucks her head in the crook of his shoulder. “I still remember the night I saw my first meteor shower. I went on about it for _weeks_. Bless them, Amy and Rory tried to listen to me, but they didn’t really understand. They were only human, to be fair to them. And nine years old.” She laughs. “God, I told my class about it at show-and-tell. They looked at me like I was mad. Which was how they looked at me most of the time. I remember having to stand in the corridor to calm down because I shouted at them for being stupid. I was so _cross_ that no-one cared.”

He smiles at her, meteors in his eyes. “I care.” 

* * *

It had been a rather eventful dinner, to say the least. Well. They hadn’t exactly made it through dinner. Neither of them had spotted the small child from the family sitting nearby crawling under the table until he’d retrieved River’s vortex manipulator from her purse and disappeared in a crackle of smoke.

The toddler was called Helios, they’d discovered, from the parents frantically screaming his name in their faces. With profuse apologies and insisting that they had not in fact evaporated their son, they’d made promises to get him back in time for dessert. 

They’d traced the coordinates with their sonics and found the little boy, of course, down a highly explosive cluster of Malappian hive mines three planets over. They’d just managed to hop over in the Tardis, bundle Helios into the Doctor’s arms and leg it before the whole thing blew up behind them. Her vortex manipulator had been lost in the hives and the Tardis had, wisely, taken herself back to Darillium (they’d re-programmed the HADS to send her there, but River suspects she’s rather grown fond of the place anyway), so they’d had to call for a rescue shuttle back home.

They sit opposite each other on the passenger seats of the otherwise empty pod, feet stretched out so the toes of their shoes almost touch. Helios had bounced around the cabin for the first twenty minutes, reciting the Darillian alphabet in the wrong order with the names of a few animals thrown in, until the Doctor had blessedly sent him to sleep via a psychic knock-out. He’s sprawled across her husband’s lap, open-mouth snoring. The Doctor has fallen quiet himself, looking down at the boy with a smile on his face.

River flicks ashes off her singed dress. “Not exactly how I envisioned our anniversary going.”

He raises an eyebrow, his voice quiet so as not to rouse the kid. “Have any of our anniversaries been how you envisioned them?”

She laughs. “Not remotely. Mind you, this turned out to be rather fun.”

“It did, didn’t it?”

He smooths Helios’ wild halo of curls back with his hand when he mumbles in his sleep - and _oh_ , there it is again. That sucker-punch to the stomach. She’s been thinking about it a bit lately - hard not to, with this beautiful little lifetime they’ve built over the past year; all of the linear years to come, to do whatever they please. Today has been little help, of course. Seeing her husband with children has always stirred feelings in her that she’d never believed herself capable of.

“I lied to you.”

She says it before she can stop herself. He looks up at her, surprised, but leaves the silence for her to fill. “You asked me, ages ago, if I’d ever thought about it.” She nods to the small child asleep on his lap, smiling a little at the sight of it. “Babies. And I said no; of course I hadn’t.”

The memory rings clear as a bell. Somewhat ironically, it wasn’t long after Asgard - on yet another date gone awry where they’d somehow ended up childminding someone else’s kids while also trying to save the world. He’d asked her so casually, so in passing when he caught her smiling at the little baby he bounced on his knee that, caught like a deer in headlights, old defenses had risen and she’d hidden it away. She’d spent the years that followed that day telling herself it had been the right thing to do.

He watches her now, curious and kind, and she loves when she can see him thinking. The way his frown lines soften as he pieces her words together. 

“I did wonder what it would be like. Sometimes,” she admits - almost in a whisper, though the air between them suddenly seems so very quiet that she feels like she’s shouting. “With you.”

If her words shock him, scare him, horrify him - any of the many, many reactions she’s anticipated he might have to this most unknown part of her - he doesn’t show it. He listens, everything in him still; not running, not changing the subject. 

“For me, the life I’ve had… having a child would be the biggest, most terrifying thing I could ever do,” she goes on. “And you… you showed me how much I can love someone. You’re the only person who’s ever made me feel like, maybe, if the wind stood fair and the timing was perfect… I’d like to do it.”

They’re on Darillium’s horizon now. The singing of the Towers is faint, but she notices it as it grows closer. It’s the first time she’s really marked it in a while, she realises - it’s become an ever-present background noise, like a ticking clock, or breathing. 

Helios shifts in his sleep, head lolling to the side so his cheek is pillowed in the Doctor’s jacket, and she smiles in a way that makes her ache. “I always thought it must feel incredible. Something brand new and unique, and _alive_ , growing inside you. Bringing them into the universe. Seeing it all anew through their eyes. A whole person made up of stardust, and honey, and… hope. It’s like magic.”

He smiles at that. But then, he’s always loved poetry. “Why did you lie?” he asks, no judgement in his voice.

She sighs softly, shaking her head. “Even if you had wanted it too, it’s not as if we were ever in a position to do anything about it. Our timelines out of whack, you in the Tardis, me in Stormcage. We could never have brought a child into that.”

They’re fast approaching the docking bay near the restaurant; the dark silhouettes of the Towers loom in the passenger window, and she looks to them at the same time he does.

“I never knew a real childhood,” she murmurs. “More often than not, the idea of someone like me being a mother seemed ridiculous. I thought you would laugh at me.” She smiles apologetically, still not quite comfortable with showing the damage. “But that was always part of why I wanted it. To give someone of my own all the things I never had.” 

“I wouldn’t have laughed,” he says, soft and sincere.

She smiles at him, a lump growing in her throat. “Thank you.”

“If I asked you another question, now,” he says. “Would you be honest with me?”

She thinks about it for a moment, and nods. “I would.”

“Do you want to have a baby?”

She exhales softly, gently teasing even though his words have left her hearts in freefall. “Are you asking?” 

His eyes soften at the memory, and he smiles - the way he smiled when she saw this face, really saw it, for the first time. Like all the secrets of the universe are shared just between the two of them. “Yes.”

She watches him watching her, an entire future unfurling in front of them.

“Yes.”


End file.
